


"Causality Violation"

by EA Karras and Agirl_gonemad (Anne)



Category: Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Alternate Reality, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:36:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anne/pseuds/EA%20Karras%20and%20Agirl_gonemad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system."</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Causality Violation"

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of unfinished. But it is also sort of finished.

Allison had dreams. Lots of dreams. Not...dreams to go to college, to get married, have kids. Well, she had those too, but these were the sleeping sort of dreams. Nightmares, really, she guessed you could say. Dreams about wars, about people dying. Dreams about fire and disease and monsters. 

Lots of dreams. 

What she didn’t like about her dreams was that they didn’t feel like dreams. Sure, she knew she was asleep, she knew that she was dreaming. But it also felt so real. Like she was seeing things that were really happening. 

It didn’t help that at the end of these dreams someone would always grab at her, scream at her that she wasn’t really dreaming, that what she was seeing was real and she needed to do something to help him. Sometimes he was a boy. Sometimes a teenager, sometimes he was at least 20 or 30 years older than she was, but he was always the same person. 

She hated her dreams because she always felt so...useless? What could she do about something she only saw in her sleep?

Not terribly far from the town Allison had lived in all her life there was a sort of government project. One day this object had just shown up, completely integrated into the base’s mainframe and power systems. The machine looked like something from the Jetsons had been left in the desert for half a century - much more technologically advanced than anything currently, but also a great deal worse for wear. And they had no idea how the hell it got there or where it came from. 

So, naturally, they tried to remove it. Take it apart, take it offline, something. Because it very obviously didn’t belong there. Those attempts were met with disastrous results. Removing it from the power supply just meant that it reattached itself, nearly instantaneously. Shutting down the power meant it rerouted it somehow, including one instance involving rerouting and claiming an entire hydro-electric dam just for it’s own energy input. Opening fire on the object was useless and tended to cause more ricochet than anything. Chemical warfare did nothing to harm the outside of the machine - or it’s contents. 

Attempting to open it merely resulted in a lot of broken machinery and several braindead soldiers, so after a few months that was given up upon. Whatever the machine was, it was programmed with a very thorough and precise set of reactions to being attacked, examined, removed from it’s designated power source, or opened. So once the military and government agreed that they couldn’t open or remove the thing, they decided to study it. 

Which was definitely the more lucrative idea. 

The machine, dubbed the Artichoke after the project name it was hastily assigned, didn’t communicate directly. It sent out complex data on various waves, usually as a response to a query posited in it’s direction using any number of computer languages, from GOFAI to the most secure encryption the government could create. While it was definitely problematic that this machine could understand anything they threw at it, it was almost overshadowed by how much technological intel it spit back out as a response. Not all of it was even usable for several years, requiring some other private or public-sector development or a historical event for the information to become usable. It didn’t predict the future as much as it seemed to be shaping it, haphazardly, through the base’s attempt to communicate with it. 

The only thing it didn’t seem terribly interested in was warfare. Which was oddly specific, but if the intel had a direct relation to operations abroad or at home that were strictly military, the machine would simply go silent. 

Several soldiers and staff claimed that at those times the output from the machine, when played over a sound system of any sort, sounded rather familiar to a prenatal heartbeat. Obviously, this was dismissed as some sort of fluke of hearing, since they couldn’t find a heartbeat within the output when it was scanned otherwise. 

But inside...

Inside a boy was dreaming. Or he’d been a boy, once, and he’d open a door and things had changed. His mother remembered her son, still had dreams about them, but while at first they’d been nightmares very similar to Allison’s, they were now a different matter entirely. She dreamed about memories she didn’t have, raising a son that her doctors tell her she never gave birth to, and it’s possibly the only thing that keeps her bothering to live through the medications they drug her with. 

Inside of that machine, a boy dreams about his mother, and that his screaming for her help once upon a time completely ruined her mind. 

He should have stopped, maybe, but he wasn’t always in control of what happened in his dreams. He saw the future, the past. Things he remembered but maybe things he shouldn’t. So Allison had these nightmares, and then finally, the boy stopped screaming. He was still there, and there was still something very wrong. Unsettling about his presence, not really comforting at all. 

But he wasn’t demanding things of her anymore. 

That was certainly a change. For the better? For the worse? She wasn’t really sure. Sometimes, when she woke up, she wrote down the things she dreamed about. Dreams meant things, right? So maybe her dreams, her nightmares, meant something too. But none of the books she found in the library ever had anything to say about dreams like hers. 

Not dreams that specific. 

Not that she gave up on looking. She did everything except talk to people about what she dreamed. That, she thought, would’ve just been trouble. Calling for psychiatrists or something like that, and she didn’t really want that. Not ever. 

For a while the setting is still the same - something’s wrong with the sky, or there aren’t any windows, but the older she gets and the further she gets through school the more that changes too. There’s a whole year when the boy in her dreams doesn’t actually say anything to her, just seems to be waiting or watching for something. When he does, her dream changes again. The skies are gone, and the fires are put out. All the buildings go down in the ground, but they’re gorgeous. A mix of fantasy, historical architecture and her father’s design. Not all of it is even recognizable to her. 

He has to ask several times before she can hear his voice however. “Helping or hindering things?”

Some of the buildings, she’s seen before. Not in real life, but on her father’s boards, in his notebooks. Things he works on when people are asleep, or he’s had a long, long day at work. It’s interesting. It’s bizarre. As bizarre to her as her apparent inability to focus on one particular subject at school. Medicine and science and dance, it’s all bizarre to her. 

More so in the dream than in real life. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think I want to do this. I don’t think I have a choice. Everything fights to live.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Because it doesn’t seem like fighting to her. It seems like pushing. 

“I’m sorry.” There’s sincerity in that, but confusion too. Almost like her own feelings mirrored back to her. “I wouldn’t do it the same way again. Any of it. But that makes things worse, starting over from zero. Keep it up and it’ll be older than most civilization.” The boy sits on a stair and the colors of the walls change. “We’d be relics before we were even born.” 

“You’d have to start over from year one to make all of this go away?” She’s guessing, but that’s what it sounds like. “We’re already born, aren’t we?”

“An origin point.” He traces the math against the stonework and it becomes etched in like it’s always been there. “Each time you go back, zero goes with you. Earlier and earlier. It’ll be like a game between them, or it would’ve been if not for me. Chess between the destroyer and the fixer. Now I’m stuck in the middle and the fixer is part of me. All of time in a breath while I’m trapped and dreaming.” The boy shakes his head. “Not anymore. For me. You’re okay.”

“Only because you stopped yelling at me.” She watches him, tries to memorize the math. How surprised will she be when it shows up on her father’s blueprints? “Why aren’t you?”

“I was scared. I was...little and all the bad things were happening at once. I died, I think. But I’m not dead anymore. But I haven’t been born either. I’m missing from the natural order of things.” The math will show up in a lot of places, almost with a religious reverence. Always in pieces, never complete. No one will want to finish it, it’s like the equation to how to destroy humanity. 

“You weren’t little all the time. Sometimes you were older than me. Older than now.” She wonders if he’ll be older again tomorrow night, or the next. 

“I did say I died.” Shrugging. “But the fear was...I don’t know. No one wants to die. No one wants to be taken from their lives. But it happens, it always happens. Maybe this always happens too.”

“Maybe. I just don’t understand why you want me to see it.”

“I know you but I don’t know you. I wish it was different. Maybe that’s enough?” Shaking his head. “It’s not an excuse. There should’ve been more forethought. Maybe this is the first round of mistakes. How strict is the learning curve anyway?”

“I don’t know. You seem to know more than I do. I don’t even know if this is real. It might be a really elaborate dream.”

“I don’t like knowing more than you do. But there’s a probability engine where my brain should be.” He looks away. 

“If you didn’t have a brain, you wouldn’t be scared.”

“Everything fights to live,” he reminds her, “no matter what their brain turns out to be.”

“Then why did you stop asking me to help you?”

“We’re still fighting in our way. But what good is making you more scared?”

“Probably not good at all.”

“We’re still learning.”

She’s not really sure what we means, but. She’s not sure she wants to ask. “I guess.”

“Do you want normal dreams instead?”

She doesn’t even know what a normal dream is anymore. “No. I guess not.”

“You could dream of the beach, or the park...or dancing.”

Pausing. “Do you want me to dream about those things?”

Wrinkling his nose. “I want you to be happy, that’s it.”

“Why?” Her dream wanting that isn’t that unusual, is it?

“Why not? I thought that’s what dreams were for?”

“Not always. Or people wouldn’t have bad ones.”

“You’ve had enough bad dreams. Time for something else.”

She tilts her head at him. “Do you want to dance with me?” 

“...okay.” Why not?

Why not indeed. She’ll hold out a hand, then. 

“I don’t really know how.” But he’ll learn, apparently.

“I can show you.” It couldn’t be that hard, in a dream, right? 

“I’ll pick it up.” No, not really. Though he makes a few mistakes, it’s not that bad. 

It’s not bad at all. It’s nice, really. Almost feels real, which is nicer.

“Maybe it should be more dreams like this.”

“Would that help anything?”

“It’d help you, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know. It might. Would it help you?”

He nods. “Yeah. Sure!”

“Okay. Then more dreams like this, I suppose.”

“Okay. It’s a deal.”

Smiling at him, for a moment. “Okay. Good.”

“I should probably let you get some normal sleep.” He kisses her cheek and then that’s it. Nothing but blankness until she wakes up. 

She’s not really sure she likes the blankness anymore than nightmares, but at least it’s restful, right? Or something like that, anyway. The next morning, she looks at more of her father’s blueprints, she goes to school, she talks to the people she knows. Her actual life? Not as interesting as her dreams, she thinks.

But now her dreams are sometimes just talking about what happens in her actual life. It’s interesting. A little weird, sometimes, but. There’s still a lot of fantastical architecture involve, and for now, the boy stays at her age. No more bombs, or blood, or screaming people. But sometimes it feels like there are rooms in her dreams, things she can’t see. Things she doesn't even remember wanting to investigate until she’s awake, but later when she’s asleep there are other things. Distractions. 

It’s nothing bad, just a little strange. 

A little. She doesn’t mind, sometimes, when she forgets these things. The boy is what she finds interesting, most of the time. He seems more real than anything else in her dream, and she couldn’t exactly shake that feeling. Not even when things started happening around the city, around the world that she feels like she’s seen before. 

In a dream, maybe.

“Is it weird, that I’m in your head?” Today has been complicated. Someone asked Allison out and all that uncertainty is written on the boy’s face. Is it better that she goes? Is it better that she doesn’t? Can you cheat on a dream in the first place?

She isn’t sure she wants to go out with the boy, but the reason why isn’t entirely clear to her. You can’t date a dream, can you? “I don’t know. I don’t have anything to compare it to.”

“But you’d know if you felt weird.” Frowning. “Right?”

“I think so. Wouldn’t you? Know?”

“It’s not if it’s weird for me, it’s if it’s weird for you. You’re already...” He sighs. “You don’t want to go to the movies with Morris because you’d rather go with me. I don’t know. That doesn’t sound fair to you.”

“I want to go with you, yeah. I know I can’t, though. But...that’s not the only reason I don’t want to go with Morris.”

“What else is it?”

“I don’t like him like that.”

“It could be fun.”

“Maybe. As friends.”

“Still. You don’t like anyone that way. Don’t you think you’ll get lonely?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. You’re here, sort of.”

“I’m not around when you’re awake.”

“No. I know.” And yet. 

“I don’t want you to be lonely.”

“I know.” She wonders now, if something’s wrong with her. Liking a dream more than a real person. 

He huffs at her. “There’s nothing wrong with you, don’t think that.”

“I don’t feel lonely.”

“...well. Okay, I guess.”

Should she, is something she will wonder about when she’s awake. Even though she doesn’t. “Is it?”

“If I went on and on about it not being okay you’d just get angry with me. And you still wouldn’t go to the movies.”

“No, probably not.” But she really wishes she could go with him. “Are you? Lonely?”

“No. There’s always something.” He thinks you kind of have to be alive to be lonely. 

“Do you talk to other people?” If, for instance, he were really a boy.

Instead of the amalgamation of two lifetimes and a time-controlling AI. “Not as directly?”

Or a dream. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. People dream. Maybe I’ll show them something and if they like it I’ll show them more. There’s...there’s one other person I talk to a lot. But she’s really sad, so.”

“Oh?” She’s surprised. Maybe other things. “Why is she sad?”

“She lost her son. And then she forgot him for a while.” More like the world forgot him, but he’s not sure he wants to tell Allison that. Visiting Sarah is hard.

“That’s sad. Is that why you visit?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure if it helps...but that’s why.”

“I hope it helps. Being sad isn’t...that great.” Obviously.

“I don’t want her to be sad, but I don’t think I can fix it either. I don’t want you to be sad.”

“I’m not sad. I don’t think I’m sad.”

“No...you’re not.” He’s still worried that she will be.

“Are you sad?” Frowning, as the idea hadn’t occured to her. Really.

“Uhm...I don’t know.” Cop out. “Things could be better, things have been worse.”

She can tell that it’s a cop out. “How could it be better?”

“There could be...world peace!” Sticking out his tongue at her.

“Ha ha.” Making a face at him. 

“I don’t want to talk about my problems though.”

“Oh. Okay.” She wonders, a little, why that is.

“They’re not that important. You’d just worry about them all day.”

“How do you know I won’t anyway?”

“You can’t worry about something you know nothing about.”

“I can worry because I don’t know it.”

"But you shouldn't."

“But why not?”

"Seems kinda silly, worrying about nothing.

Frowning. “It doesn’t feel like nothing. Or silly.” But she feels weird getting annoyed at a dream.

"If you can't change it, I don't want you to worry about it. If it's something you can change, I'll tell you. Deal?"

Hesitant. “How will you know if I can or not?”

“Because I know exactly what it is."

She would point out that he doesn’t know what she can or can’t do. But maybe he does, if he’s in her head. “All right.”

"It'll be okay."

She wants to believe that. “Okay.”

"I promise."

“Okay. I believe you.”

"Good. I want you to."

“I want you to be happy.”

"Well. I'm getting there."

“All right. Good.” 

He laughs. “What a weird argument.”

“I guess so.” Arguing with a dream probably is kind of weird, right?

More than a little bit. He’s also amused at the concept of arguing about his happiness, of all things. “Let’s not do it again.”

“I’ll try.” She can promise that anyway.

“Thanks.”

She can at least hug him, right? “You’re welcome.”

She can. He’s always a little surprised when she does though, not that he won’t hug her back. 

That’s probably good, then. “Time to wake up?”

“Yeah...sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’ll be back, right?”

“Unless you suddenly don’t need sleep, but I’m not seeing that happening anytime soon.”

“No, me either. Hey, maybe I can dream us a movie.” Ha. 

“I mean if you wanted to.”

“I do.” And she probably will, if not the next day than the one after that.

Better than whatever he might come up with for movies, right? “Ok, cool. I’ll be here.”

Hopefully. “I know.” And with that, she’ll wake up. Go back to her life of school and whatever else she ends up doing. She will go to the movies with Morris, but with the understanding that it’s as friends. 

He’s not entirely happy with that, but.

But. It’s not awful. The boy in her head thinks it’s good for her to go out and do things. Be social. Have fun. 

Her father, recently, spends lot of time in meetings. Talking to other designers, architects, engineers about this...pattern in design that’s occurring all over the world. People interested in building in and downward, not upward. As if there’s something wrong with skyscrapers. Or if people will need to live underground. 

It might be the latter. It’s not just buildings, it’s houses, it’s schools. Other things too. Even a park. It’s entire cities, in some cases. 

When Allison’s medical classes start teaching them things about living underground, about how people would live underground. That’s when she’s sure something new and different and strange is happening. Or about to happen. 

Weirdly enough her dreams don’t address any of this. There are bits and pieces of it in her dreams, definitely, and those pieces become more...active as she learns more about it, but it’s never really talked about. The boy in her head, in her dreams, is more interested in her life and how she’s living it than weird events around the world.

She’s more than happy to have somewhere to go where she doesn’t have to talk about the weird things going on. Talking about small things, even stupid things is a lot better. Though, she sometimes wishes that they talked more about him. 

“Why would you want to talk about me?” Walking with her through something that seems to be a cross between a forest and ruins. But there’s a ceiling instead of a sky. 

It’s both nice and awful. Some sort of strange combination. “Why wouldn’t I want to?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Because I like you?”

“See? An answer. You like me. We’re friends. But there’s not much to say.”

“You could tell me about what you used to do. Before this.” Before dreaming.

“I was a normal kid. And I was a man who had seen decades of a very long war.”

“Okay. So tell me about them. You.”

“Uhm...I was doing okay. As a kid. I loved my mom, everything was okay. Kind of weird, but. Nothing terrible. It was just us. But I also led soldiers, and had a lot of people die, and got married for the wrong reasons and fell in love way later.”

“That must’ve been messy. Being in love with someone you weren’t married to.”

“My wife had already died by then.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Weird thing to be sorry for? Maybe. 

“I know.” He shrugs. “But that was all forever ago, before things were set to zero.”

“Or forever from now.”

“Something like that.”

“Is this a place from then?”

“Not really? This is...the best possibility from countless probabilities.”

“So...its what you want to happen?”

“Not just wanting it. It has the best outcome. So far.”

“How so?” 

“Survival plus cultural preservation. Health equations.”

“Health equations?” 

“How healthy everyone is.”

“So like this, we’d be healthier?”

“Something like that.” Smiling at her. 

She smiles back. “Okay, well. Good.”

“It doesn’t bother you that we’re always in these kinds of places, right?”

“No, it doesn’t. Does it bother you?”

“No, not really.”

“Okay. Then it doesn’t bother me either.”

“So easy to please.” Playfully pushing her. 

Pushing back, gently. “Noooo.”

“Totally.” He smiles but thinks. “Life might get more complicated.” 

“Yeah?” More complicated than it is already. She’s not sure she can imagine it.

“You know. Politics and whatever.”

“Oh. I’m not that into politics, though...”

“Well, no. But that doesn’t mean it won’t change things.”

“Will it change them here?”

“Yes. Everywhere, really.”

She wonders why in her dreams, specifically. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. Me too.” 

“But why are you sorry?”

Smiling a bit. “I don’t know. I guess things would change for you too, wouldn’t they?”

“Not...really.”

“Not even someday?”

“Maybe someday. But. I’m not worried about it right now.”

“You don’t worry about anything that has to do with you.”

“Because I’m safe. Kind of. Removed from the world like a fairy in a glass jar or something.”

“Always? Even glass breaks eventually.”

“I’m keeping track of it.”

She’s quiet for a moment thinking about that. More and more this seems less like a dream. “How?”

“I know what’s going on in the world outside of my bell jar.”

“Do you want out?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I think it’s safer where I am.”

“Why safer?” She doesn’t know if it’s safer. Less dangerous, which isn’t the same, exactly.

“Nothing can reach me.”

“I can, though.” 

He sighs a little. “I know...”

“That’s not bad, is it?”

“It might be, it might not be.”

“Why would it be?” She doesn’t want to to be bad.

“I’m not what anyone would expect anymore. And I might not be the person anyone would trust. Because I’m so different. Everything has changed in this box I’m breathing in.”

“But I know you. Don’t I?”

“Somewhat.” But he doesn’t point out that she’s never asked his name. 

And she doesn’t point out that he never told it to her. Not even when he was yelling at her. “So.” 

“You know how I fit in your head. But that’s not going to be the same.”

“What’s it going to be, then?”

“I don’t really know.”

She frowns a little. “So. Something to worry about, then.”

“Maybe. Worry about it when it’s happening. It’s going to be impossible to predict.”

“I will.” Frowning more. “This is real.” Not really a question.

“Reality is just how brainwaves process stimuli.”

“You know what I mean.”

Sighing. “No, I’m not a figment of your imagination.”

“I should be asking you ‘how’, things like that.”

“But do you want to ask?”

“No. I don’t know. Not now.” Not in her head.

“Then you can ask me later.”

“I will. Believe me.”

“Threats and promises.”

“Something like that.”

“I hope you don’t regret it.”


End file.
